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Thoughts on the Metaverse SummitMay 8th, 2006 |
So, I’ve already linked to a ton of other people’s commentary on the Metaverse Summit, but I haven’t given any of my own thoughts yet. If you’re used to thinking of me as the pie in the sky idealist, prepare for some grounding…!
Annotated versus virtual reality
There was a definite tug of war between two competing versions of what the metaverse means. One of them is the virtual world thing that most readers of this blog will be familiar with. The other is the annotated world augmented reality thing, which is the idea of pulling web data into the real world by overlaying it on our physical existence via heads-up specs and the like. In between is the “mirrorworld” which is a compromise, replicating the real world into virtual space and then annotating it there.
I have little doubt that all of these are dreams that are under development. But they don’t all seem to me to be the same thing at all, and I think they serve different purposes because of their usage patterns. Virtual worlds are primarily, and will continue to be primarily, for leisure time activities. Augmented reality serves a primarily practical purpose, and will continue to be best-suited for that. The killer apps for augmented reality lie in local economy applications: real estate, comparative shopping, navigation, interpersonal interaction annotation (heads-up tickler files over people’s heads, etc). The killer apps for virtual worlds have been, and will remain, chatting, hanging out with friends, and entertainment.
We’re seeing the first steps towards the annotated world stuff right now. World Heritage sites are being ddigitized, and services like Zillow are causing upheaval in their markets. These are all starting with mirrorworld applications, of course, but mirrorworld data will eventually migrate towards the two extremes. A digital Machu Picchu is much more compelling when it’s either serving as tour guide or hosting mutant dinosaurs you can kill; an inert 3d version would be one you visit once, think is cool, and then never visit again, much like most people fall in love with Google Earth (and its predecessor Keyhole) for about a week, then stop using it.
This divide stuck out for me perhaps because I am reading the latest Vernor Vinge book, Rainbows End, which is set here in San Diego, and features lots of augmented reality overlays on top of a landscape I know fairly well. Among the postulates is that kids will choose to run around in parks that are built with VR overlays for gaming — but there’s no mention of more traditional, screen-bound games. Which brings me to my next thought…
The poorly distributed future
One of my recurrent comments to other attendees was that many of the folks there needed to get out of Silicon Valley from time to time and go visit Cleveland, or Iowa, or rural Florida. You know, the real world. Some of the more enthusiastic folks were proposing brainports by 2016, and I felt obliged to stand up and point out that even if a fully functional and debugged brainport were announced by a stealth startup tomorrow, it would not have made it through the FDA by 2016.
Afterwards, chatting with Esther Dyson and Ethan Zuckerman, Ethan and I compared notes on the progress towards the “artificial pancreas” for diabetes management, something for which he has literally been waiting for 21 years despite the fact that “all the pieces are there.” (Minimed has recently deployed the first pre-alpha gen of something like this, and it’s a long way from being a real solution for all diabetes sufferers).
There’s a “last mile” problem in a lot of technologies, and metaverses are no exception. There’s this tendency to assume that just because a new technology comes into play, the old ones are replaced. But they aren’t — they are still in use even in the most trendsetting of communities. At the Summit, there were a lot of folks taking notes on paper right alongside those with laptops, and I think I was the sole tablet user. The only person I saw putting virtual worlds to real use during the summit was Robert Scoble, who seemed unable to pry himself away from Second Life. And lastly and most telling, there was an uncomfortable moment when some of the more pie-in-sky folks rhapsodized about how a virtual Darfur in Second Life could raise consciousness worldwide and Ethan slammed them for it. There’s a level of arrogance inherent in thinking that some geeks in Silicon Valley building a virtual Darfur can even begin to convey what actually happens in the Third World when many of those on the ground cannot grasp it.
Just as the screen-bound games are not going to go away (check out the resurgence in retro games!), Zillow isn’t going to kill off all the real estate agents either. There’s a large and aging population that won’t be gone by 2016 who will stick to the old methods; a large proportion of the younger folks will still prefer the handholding another person can offer; and the affluent will do the math and conclude that the cost of paying an agent may well be a better deal than the lost value of their hourly earnings if they did it themselves. Technologies accrete. Many of the loftier visions of social impact were centered around the incorrect notion that technologies replace, and that’s just not how the world works.
The metaverse is flat
The subtitle of the summit was “Pathways to the 3d web.” Some folks, like Daniel James, spent much time crossing out the word “3d” everywhere they saw it. As Randy Farmer noted in “3d is like blue.” It’s an attribute. What’s more, it’s a fairly useless attribute in many cases.
I have become persuaded that a huge part of why Korea boasts such a burgeoning MMO player population is because they didn’t go 3d as quickly as the West did. Yes, I blame EverQuest. 3d is pretty, significantly more immersive, and it’s more than twice as hard to adopt. The average person does not know how to navigate a virtual 3d space, the control complexity is significantly higher than any 2d environment demands, and most of our applications of virtual spaces haven’t actually needed 3d interaction anyway. The idea embodied in one of the OpenCroquet demos, of playing chess in a 2d window whilst in a 3d space, just underlines how superfluous the 3d space is to that particular application. It’s wonderful that you can collaboratively build 3d objects, but why do you want to?
Technology should follow needs. Some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, mySpace, Amazon, and eBay. That’s where the volume is.
Similarly, there was a curious infatuation with space, closely tied to the love of 3d. Replicating New York down to every single apartment is neat and mostly useless. Space is an obstacle separating locations of interest. Empty space should exist only for the sake of it being filled with things of interest, or for the purpose of keeping locations of interest from overlapping.
We’ve known since the earliest virtual worlds that the topology of virtual spaces has more in common with subway maps than with Cartesian grid maps. Almost every world has involved forms of teleportation, and the “lumpy” distribution of population means that the world is seen from the point of view of major stops, not as a location-equivalent grid. For me, right now in the real world, San Francisco is closer than Big Bear, because I can hop a plane there and skip the boring bits. Skipping the boring bits is one of the big advantages of virtuality.
Ah, cycles
It seems like every ten years there’s a boomlet, and everyone who was doing virtual worlds the “old way” goes down, and a bunch of new mammal companies and organizations come up. Both the design assumptions and the business models tend to change at the same time. The last big boom was ten years ago, and marked by a serious swath of names that all started at just about the same time (though they didn’t all finish together):
- Lineage
- The Realm
- Meridian 59
- Kingdom of the Winds
- Ultima Online
- Everquest
- Asheron’s Call
- Dark Sun Online
What these brought to the table was a certain level of production values and a new, flat fee subscription model. They killed off a ten-year-old generation of games that had focused on time-based fees and didn’t have the same budgets. But those, in their turn, killed off an earlier generation, and so on.
Only around 3-4 significant virtual world releases happen in a given year in the whole world. Right now, we’re seeing that generational shift happen, and WoW isn’t the first of the new: it’s among the last of the old. The Summit asked us to forecast ten years out, and I think the safest prediction is that whatever we think is the next big thing will be dying off in ten years as a new disruptive approach is born.
That doesn’t minimize the importance of the disruptive stuff happening right now. The buzzwords that are making money circle the metaverse people once again: open platforms, networking multiple worlds, web integration, social networks, ancillary businesses, free play, microtransactions. A huge portion of this is going to be dotcom hype all over again. But some of it won’t be.
Because of that, as curmudgeony as this post might have seemed, I’m still very much an optimist and idealist about all this. I just think that tempering the dreams a little and focusing on the strengths of virtual worlds is what makes sense.

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Original post:Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit by at Google Blog Search: vs. online player in chess free
Raph’s Website � Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit
del.icio.us croquet bookmarks del.icio.us warning: non-utf8 string! (sorry)
is/are wrong, and less frequently, that their opinion is right. This was the exchange (about a week or two old, now):Me: Granted, it must be nice to know who you’re speaking to and why they’re wrong from the outset. I’ve always envied that. Prokofy
Raph Koster has a very interesting discussion going on about online worlds and the march toward a Metaverse. There is also a related discussion about “exceptionalism” in regards to the Metaverse discussion. I really don’t want to say much about it here, other than to point you to the discussion. This is for a couple of reasons:
this film is extraordinary, not just for it’s use of technology but for it’s fantastic perception looking forward.” Here is the 2014 version. Here is the 2015 version. I can’t decide if this is cool or creepy. To Listen to Session interviews: To Hear Raph Koster’s take on the two competing views of the Metaverse A great CNET article on the summit Keynote Speech from Mike Liebhold (it’s the second to last link) All are definitely worth a look. For those of you who are fascinated by human interactions, technology
[IMG web] (Noticia no disponible en castellano) It seems Slashdot is getting a new design. As we could be no less, Jynus.com is currently doing the same. Hope you like the new style! Problems, suggestions and comments about the new style, here.
[via Kevin Werbach]Raph Koster writes: There was a definite tug of war between two competing versions of what the metaverse means. One of them is the virtual world thing that most readers of this blog will be familiar with. The other is the annotated world augmented reality
fabrication and delivery. All of the technology to do this exists in Second Life today. I think the project also serves as a useful concrete example which sheds some light on some of the ephemeral issues surrounding Web 3.D, the Metaverse Roadmap and Overlay Worlds versus Mirror Worlds versus virtual worlds. First, this project was fundamentally 3D. Although virtual world veterans quite rightly point out that a lot of what we do gains nothing from 3D, there are things that people do, like designing and building kitchens, that really are 3D and would
Raph Koster has a very interesting discussion going on about online worlds and the march toward aMetaverse. There is also a related discussion about “exceptionalism” in regards to the Metaverse discussion. I really don’t want to say much about it here, other than to point you to the discussion. This is for a couple of reasons:
Raph Koster
[...] Comments [...]
[...] one another, and the probable future direction of metaverses and reality annotation. Worth reading.(Post a new comment) Log in now.(Create account, or useOpenID) [...]
[...] Sounds pretty crazy doesn’t it. Well, there are some problems. And although there’s some really cool stuff being done right now, The Metaverse isn’t going to take over quite yet, if at all. For a few good write-ups about just why not, go ahead and read Raph and M3mnoch’s thoughts. [...]
The Metaversal Echo Chamber
A pair of conferences exploring virtual worlds have come and gone. I was able to attend several SDForum panels in avatar form, thanks to a streaming video window made available in Second Life by The Electric Sheep Company. But I missed out on the elite…
[...] Related Stories Offsite: Raph Koster’s Roadmap Roundup Offsite: Raph Koster’s Thoughts On The Metaverse Summit Mapping a Path For the 3D Web | Log in/Create an Account | Top | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 0 comments 0: 0 comments 1: 0 comments 2: 0 comments 3: 0 comments 4: 0 comments 5: 0 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) [...]
[...] Raph Koster’s Roadmap roundup and his further thoughts, in which he highlights one of my favorite ideas when thinking about things like this: technology should follow needs. (Which is not to say that it’s my ideas, just one I like.) [...]
[...] Raph Kostera>: “Some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, mySpace, Amazon, and eBay. That’s where the volume is.” [...]
[...] Raph’s Website � Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit Raph Koster’s thoughts on the Metaverse summit… including my…ahem…explosion… (tags: immweb secondlife blogs) [...]
[...] Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit – Raph Koster’s thoughts after the event. [...]
[...] There is a great discussion happening on Raph Koster’s blog about the Metaverse and Metaverse Roadmap Summit between Prokofy Neva and Raph. Worth checking out. [...]
[...] As noted on Clickable Culture, the blogoshphere is buzzing about Second Life. Everyone from Robert Scobble to Adam Curry to Raph Koster is discussing Second Life and the Metaverse. The best part about it is that serious discussion about Virtual Worlds has hit a broader discourse. [...]
[...] Given how often the amateur versus expert issue raises itself in relation to Second Life — whether in terms of content creation, medical research, game creation, etc — it seems somehow appropriate to watch Raph and Perkofy slug it out over on Raph’s blog. In the blue corner we have Raph Koster, till recently SOE’s Chief Creative Office and Big Thinker ™ on Virtual Worlds. In the red corner, Perkofy Neva, undisputed heavywieght champion of extended posts, big thoughts on Second Life, and continuous challenges to authority. Go read it — it’s interesting. [...]
[...] There’s a terrorist on Raph’s blog commenting on Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit. He’s not really a terrorist; he’s a Second Life brand champion, but he scares me still. Anyone else want to leap into the fray? Raph’s blog is a virtual world experiment. You can either rush to his defense, join the opposition, or post saucy remarks like me. Sadly, there is no "phat lewt" to be gained. There’s only the satisfaction of participation._________________Morgan Ramsay [...]
[...] I therefore assume (perhaps mistakenly) that the impetus for this post actually comes from the extended discussion with Prokofy Neva over on my blog, and most specifically the comments that you referenced in your own blog post yesterday. [...]
Second Life Kitchen, Real Life Cooking
The kitchen I designed in Second Life last summer now exists in real life. I did most of the work before I went to the Austin Game Conference, but we had to move our 500 plus CDs out of the
Metaverse Grudge Match
In the wake of the Metaverse Roadmap (are you tired of hearing about this event yet?) a really interesting distributed conversation has developed that has as its main interlocutors massively multiplayer game designer Raph Koster, chief technology offic…
[...] [Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info] Below are 25 friends entries, after skipping 75 most recent ones:[<< Previous 25 entries -- Next 25 entries >>] May 8th, 2006 08:43 pmalecaustin[Link] Raph Koster on Metaverses/Technology AdoptionRaph Koster has an excellent post up about how technologies tend to accrete, not simply replace one another, and the probable future direction of metaverses and reality annotation. Worth reading. [...]
[...] Raph’s Website » Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit [...]
[...] Prokofy Neva said, in the Metaverse roadmap discussion thread, What’s so tangled and complex about “who governs” (or as I put it often, “who develops?”) The game devs develop, and the game devs govern. Their junior partners, in the form of mods or wizards or junior devs or whatever are merely replications. [...]
[...] May 26, 2006Blogged Out: Snow Crash MountainWelcome to ‘Blogged Out’, the news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week we look at the metaverse. Clockwork Pistols At Virtual Dawn Science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s fictional concept of the ‘metaverse’ has been adopted as updated concept for the new articulations of cyberspace – for the 3D realm which encompasses everything the web is now, and where everyone could potentially be represented by their personalised avatars in a virtual information space. The Metaverse Roadmap conference was intended to take a look at what this 3D web might entail, asking questions about the relationship between game worlds, business, 3D web apps and the general flow of online information, while at the same time collecting the usual suspect of luminaries up to enable them to articulate their thoughts on what this metaverse thing might actually be. Stephenson’s fictional construct has been used to articulate numerous ideas about where the web is going (including an interesting question from Ed Castronova about why there isn’t an academic virtual world in which regulated, non-commercial research can be conducted), but it has also become a unique field of battle. The trickiest salvos in this conflict were delivered just after the conference in the comments accompanying the Metaverse Roadmap blog thread of theoretician of fun, Raph Koster. The leading massively multiplayer games thinker came under fire from Second Life’s most outspoken critic and advocate, Prokofy Neva, in a voluminous and hotly argued exchange that has spread across multiple threads and forums across the blogosphere. Prokofy attacked numerous aspects of what Koster said, but also much of what the Second Lifer perceived he stood for. The Metaverse Roadmap came under fire for not being diverse enough, and featuring a familiar set of ‘panel-dwellers’, such as Koster: “You don’t get diversity just from ‘multiple generations of technology’ – for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as ‘the Metaverse’ it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological – not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs – not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The ‘non-profit’ types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it – but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test – take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see – does it work for them?” Prokofy was making some valid points amid the contention, arguing that the real innovators on this new frontier might not the developers and gamers, but the people who were using the likes of Second Life for business or education: “I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead.” Blogger Mark Wallace sums this idea up rather differently on 3pointD: “The fact is, gameworlds have already done their part for the metaverse. Second Life would probably not exist were it not for its predecessors in text and graphical virtual worlds. But what SL is trying to do (albeit somewhat clumsily) is create a kind of grand mashup between a social world and a technology platform like the Web. In fact, it’s explicitly mashing a 3D space into the Web with the coming integration of Web services into SL. Combine this with graphics capabilities, the Western world’s Web-connectedness and a younger generation that’s primed to use 3D online spaces, and you get something fundamentally different from a place like LambdaMOO, which Raph calls ‘EXACTLY LIKE SECOND LIFE’ (his caps).” What it all comes down to, of course, is whether people actually want to do all of this in 3D, or whether, as Randy Farmer points out, “3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue.” Are any of the things that Second Life claims to want to do actually better done in 3D? Or is what is really better done in 3D simply the act of play? Sure, some people are making a buck now, and creating some interesting tools… but do the 60,000 people in Second Life make as much of a difference to the world as the millions logging on with the sole intention of playing games and having fun? [Jim Rossignol is a freelance journalist based in the UK his game journalism has appeared in PC Gamer UK, Edge and The London Times.]POSTED: 10.39am PST, 05/26/06 – Jim Rossignol – LINK[05.25.06] [Next Column] [View All...] [View Other Blogged Out Columns] [...]
[...] Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit — see, more Prokofy means more readers! [...]
[...] Someone held a summit on the Metaverse and didn’t invite me Oh well, but at least there are plenty of thoughts around from blogs of the attendees.Lets start by pointing out the website of the organizers of the conference:http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/Basically, the point of the conference was to layout a possible roadmap that will get us to a "Metaverse" by 2016. On the roadmap overview page, they list imminent technological and societal changes to get us there. In the true spirit of the internet, information about the goings on at the summit can be found in podcastsand blogsand some scattered media outlets. The latter reporting that the conference was not without controversy:The trickiest salvos in this conflict were delivered just after the conference in the comments accompanying the Metaverse Roadmap blog thread of theoretician of fun, Raph Koster. The leading massively multiplayer games thinker came under fire from Second Life’s most outspoken critic and advocate, Prokofy Neva, in a voluminous and hotly argued exchange that has spread across multiple threads and forums across the blogosphere.Prokofy attacked numerous aspects of what Koster said, but also much of what the Second Lifer perceived he stood for. The Metaverse Roadmap came under fire for not being diverse enough, and featuring a familiar set of ‘panel-dwellers’, such as Koster:"You don’t get diversity just from ‘multiple generations of technology’ – for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as ‘the Metaverse’ it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological – not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs – not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The ‘non-profit’ types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it – but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test – take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see – does it work for them?"Prokofy was making some valid points amid the contention, arguing that the real innovators on this new frontier might not the developers and gamers, but the people who were using the likes of Second Life for business or education:"I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead."More info on the exchange can be found here http://www.3pointd.com/20060516/metaverse-grudge-match/I‘m still reading all this info, so I may come up with some thoughts about it all soon. Posted by Ariane Barnes at 08:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) Trackbacks Trackback specific URI for this entry No Trackbacks Comments Display comments as (Linear | Threaded) No comments Add Comment [...]
[...] You should also check out conversation about the 3D web at Metaverse (http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/index.html) and then read this:http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/thoughts-on-the-metaverse-summit/ it’s fascinating to read how people are thinking about blurring the Web and real life. [...]
[...] I realize that I have sung the praises of adding that extra dimension over the past pages. I do not want to convey the message that 3D is some magic pixie dust. I think that Raph Koster nails the tradeoff well: “3d is pretty, significantly more immersive, and it’s more than twice as hard to adopt. “ (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/thoughts-on-the-metaverse-summit/) I would agree that navigating in 2D on a 2D screen is currently easier. Both SL and many MMORPGs are well known for having UIs with hard learning curve. Maybe the attention arrow will swing back towards hardware interfaces at some point. Mouse and keyboard does not feel like an optimal way to navigate 3D space. I do agree with Beth Noveck that “information objects convey meaning on many levels and with more layers of complexity than text.” (A Democracy of Groups http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_11/noveck/) With a more inclusive concept of literacy we will be able to communication with greater bandwidth. I think the work at the Space Flight Museum more than hints at a possible evolution towards more social, interactive and visual communication. I think that this will be very beneficial towards making sense of abstract information and letting us tackle larger problems together. It is important to bear in mind that the SL ecosystem is very much 2D and 3D. The 3D environment might be at the heart of it, but nearly every resident I talked to visited websites as a part of their SL experience. In Play Between Worlds T. L. Taylor comments on how it hard to imagine a game like EQ without the web resources. (Play Between worlds, M. Jakobsson in Chapter 3, p. 84) I feel the same way about SL. Resident creativity has spilled onto the 2D web in a big way. There are many examples and I’ll list but a few here: Think of how the Space Flight augmented their collaborative building with a wiki. SL Boutique (http://www.slboutique.com/) that recently surpasses 100000 listed items (http://www.3pointd.com/20060803/100000-items-listed-on-slboutique/) offers shopping via a 2D web interface. Payments are integrated with SL accounts. Using the SL history wiki the residents collaboratively write their own history (http://history.secondserver.net) Snapzilla has become the Flickr of SL (http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/) The New World Notes blog is many residents’ primary source of SL news (http://nwn.blogs.com/) [...]
[...] Suddenly, all that time Raph has been labouring talking to gamers and Infamous Antagonists on his blog seems to make sense — if a new and different thing and better thing will come out of it. An interesting discussion on whether games or worlds are better is going on here. [...]
[...] of a 3D-web or ‘metaverse’? (I’m thinking about Prokofy Neva’s comments in this comments thread): HJ: I have long felt that the term, game, is both enabling and crippling. We have a tendency [...]
[...] is a great discussion happening on Raph Koster’s blog about the Metaverse and Metaverse Roadmap Summit between [...]
[...] Raph’s Website » Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit Share and Enjoy: [...]